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Adobe Just Became a Buy

An irrational price drop doesn't match up with business reality.

Adobe Systems(Nasdaq: ADBE) edged out analyst targets in the just-reported first quarter with $0.58 of non-GAAP earnings per share on sales of $1.03 billion, but shares fell more than 5% on the news. It seems like investors had forgotten just how important the Japanese market is to the company.

Because of the calamitous earthquake and tsunami in Japan, CEO Shantanu Narayen explained that orders dropped off dramatically in Japan this month. March is typically the best month of the year as Japanese companies often end their fiscal years at the end of the month, so this is where all the budget-flushing action tends to happen.

That's why he lowered second-quarter sales guidance by $50 million -- one-third the expected revenue from Japan, or 5% of Adobe's total revenue -- and refused to get into guessing games for the second half of the year. Reducing Adobe's market value by 5% on a short-term 5% revenue drop seems shortsighted to me, which makes for a potential buy-in opportunity today.

Adobe gave us another reason to like the stock today: The company is adjusting to the fast-moving realities of the tablet and smartphone explosion by releasing product updates more often.

A 24-month release cycle for Adobe's Creative Suite software may have been fine on an Internet time scale, where creative professionals had a fairly stable target environment to shoot for -- browser technologies just don't change dramatically very often.

But now, the Google(Nasdaq: GOOG) Android platform speaks one language, the Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL)iOS family another, and you still have to support plain old browsers and desktop computers. Developing a rich multimedia application takes fancy footwork these days, especially if you're aiming for multiple platforms.

Any or all of these environments could look very different a year from now and almost certainly will be different in two years -- and you haven't even considered what to do with newcomers like the Research In Motion(Nasdaq: RIMM) Playbook or whatever Hewlett-Packard(NYSE: HPQ) wrangles out of its Palm-born webOS assets.

Releasing a new version of InDesign, DreamWeaver, and Photoshop every year might be the only way to cope with all of that, and that's pushing Adobe to target annual updates.